Little Mountain (14 page)

         “Not that I’ve heard. Most people who know him don’t have much money.”

         “Maybe it didn’t
take
that much money.”

         “I have to run a couple of errands. Then I’ll visit Viseth. Maybe he’ll confide in me.”

         “I’ll come with you,” Fitchie said. “So I can say hello.”

Before they paid a call on Viseth, Sam drove back to Bin Chea’s street. He parked three houses up the street, and the two men walked casually. The neighborhood had pleasant yards, if small ones. A couple of small children waved at Sam from the shade of a dirt driveway. What was it that bothered him about that footprint? When they reached Chea’s house, Sam squatted on his haunches in front of the cement stoop. Wait a minute. Which step was it, the third one? The footprint wasn’t there anymore.

         The entire step was covered with a thin layer of fresh cement.

         Wilkins would kick Sam’s butt for wasting time like this, and he’d be right. But Chea had been the stickler for neatness; with Chea dead, who would take the trouble to fret over details like this?

         “What’s this about?” Fitchie asked.

         “I wish I knew,” Sam said.

The sun had dropped below the flat rooftops and left a late-afternoon wedge of shadow across Mersey Street. Sam parked his Ford three houses down from Kim’s, a safe distance from the fire plug. Why invite trouble?

         A mix of smells permeated the air: asphalt, gasoline fumes, fried garlic,
fresh
paint.
Fresh paint and Mersey Street.
An odd combination.
A boom box played rap music on a porch.

         A bare-chested girl of about Trish’s age pedaled a tricycle across the street. Sam waited for a mother to scream at the child, but no one seemed to notice. He escorted her back across the street and told her to stay there. The mother was out now, telling him and Fitchie to mind their goddamn business. Teenagers sat on porches and smoked and drank and yelled in Spanish at a white girl of about sixteen, whose hair was the color of lilacs and frizzed like cotton candy. She wore hoop earrings and a yellow blouse that hung straight down from the tips of her breasts. She had bare feet garnished with crimson nail polish on her toes. Her eyes looked past Sam’s shoulder.

         “Oh shit,” she said. “He’s still there.” She crossed into the shade across the street.

         Next door, Viseth’s house was painted the color of a pumpkin. It had a small porch on both floors. An Asian woman sat alone in a folding chair on the top floor, her face in the fading sun. Sam recognized her as Viseth’s mother. Witch grass grew between the concrete squares in the sidewalk. A boy Sam figured for seven years old picked a cigarette butt out of the gutter and put it in his mouth.

         In the cement square at the base of Viseth’s steps was a spray-painted picture of a skull and a pair of crossed baseball bats. Viseth held up a cigarette lighter and spoke in English. “Hey kid, you want a light? Step around the picture. You touch my art work and I’ll light your pants on fire.”

         The outline was a sticky red. Sam took the cigarette from the boy and ground it into the face of the skull. Viseth sat on a wooden step and glared through malevolent eyes. He had a bony, angular face and slick black hair. A cigarette was tucked behind his ear. Between his legs sat a spray can of automobile touch-up paint. Sam stepped closer until his shadow covered Viseth’s face.

         “Get off my picture,” Viseth said in English. “You’re fucking it up.”

         “You have a foul mouth, Viseth. Marking your territory?” The boy came back sucking on another unlit cigarette butt. A small crowd gathered: an old Cambodian man, a boy on a bicycle, a teenager who might have been a Battboy.

         “Whole
street’s
my territory.”

         Fitchie scratched his neck and laughed. “Soon your territory will be a cell with a bunk, a toilet, and a boyfriend.”

         “Tried to get me before, you came up with shit. You got nothing now.” Steel balls clicked as Viseth shook the spray can between his legs. Viseth was right. Sam or Willie could--and did--arrest him, but how could they hold him when no one would press charges? His girl friend
Ky’s
swollen jaw turned out to be from a fall. The old man in the emergency room with the razor slice across his cheek just cut himself shaving. Viseth had never spent a night in jail.

         “Still, it’s a dangerous neighborhood,” Sam said. “I worry about you, Viseth. Pregnant girls fall. What did
Ky
fall on?
Your fist?
How soon before you have an accident the way your friends do? My colleague Fitchie wonders if you might fall out of a moving car, but I say no, you’re much too careful. My colleague Fitchie thinks you’re stupid, though, and you’ll probably forget your seatbelt. Or you might trip and fall over your own razor blade. Who knows when one of your friends will run you down with his Trans Am? My colleague Fitchie says one of these days you’ll get careless and drown in the sewer. But I stood up for you. I said rats can swim.”

         “You’re pissed ’cause you got nothing on me.”

         “You’re scaring your neighbors.”

         “Who told you that lie? The whole street’s my friend.”

         “You don’t have any friends. People get too close to you, they have accidents. So they cross the street when they see you outside.”

         “You got no proof, and you suck besides.”

         Nearby, the boy gave up trying to light the cigarette and tossed it back into the gutter. Sam nodded in his direction. “You keep away from that boy,” he told Viseth.

         “What if I don’t?”

         “Then you better hope someone else picks you up instead of me.”

         “
You threatening
me?”

         “No. But by the time I pick you up, someone might turn your face into pizza sauce the way you did Bin Chea.”

         “Didn’t do him,” he finally said.

         “Who did?”

         “I find out, I’ll call you up. I’ll say, ‘Officer Long Dick, sir? I know who done him, I’ll tell you for a price.’ ”

         “Try shaking down the neighbors again, you’ll pay a big price.”

         “Oh, you mean the twenty bucks that nice woman loaned me?”

         “Fifty.
Unless you borrowed from someone else, too.
Pay her back now and I won’t haul you in.” Not for this, anyway. “I’ll go with you.”

         “Not now, man. Not unless she can break a hundred.”

         “She won’t have to. Fifty is interest. And if you ever bother those people again, I will take a deep--” Sam’s fingers dug into Viseth’s shoulder.

         “Let the fuck go, man.”

         “
personal--
”

         “You’re hurting me.”

        
“--interest.
I’ll watch while you thank her, and then you’ll never speak to her again. Let’s go.”

Viseth went home and took a pair of fifties from where he knew his mother hid cash. Then he slipped out the back door of his apartment, where Fitchie was waiting for him with a smile. The three walked together to the next house, where Viseth wordlessly handed the cash to the woman he’d “borrowed” from.

         “You forgot something, Viseth,” Fitchie said.

         “No. This is too much,” the woman said. She tried to return one of the bills, but Sam looked into her eyes and shook his head.

         Fitchie pushed Viseth’s hand away. “Thank the woman, you fool,” he said.

         “Thank you. Can I go now?”

A few minutes later, Viseth was home again, free from the asshole cops. He slumped on the living room couch and stared at a commercial on television. A woman was cleaning her kitchen floor, and a genie came out of a lamp to help her. What did the woman and the genie do when they were alone? Slip into the lamp and hump? When this lamp’s rockin’, don’t come knockin’? Viseth’s mother opened a TV tray in front of him, placed a beer on it, and left. “And something to eat, too,” he called out. The hundred was
nothing,
he’d just get it from somebody else. But how did Long Dick know about him and Bin Chea? Rocky must’ve shot off his mouth about the lights.

         His old lady set a plate of boiled squid under his nose. As a cook she was hopeless, eating her squid was like chewing on a rain slicker run over by a lawn mower. If it didn’t taste so good he’d kick her ass. And his old man spent all the time he could at work making boxes or whatever he did. Twelve hours of work, four hours of booze, eight hours of sleep. What a life. Viseth found the gin his old man had stashed in a cabinet, and poured himself three fingers.

         That Cambodian cop could never prove he killed Bin Chea.
Impossible.
But who knew how much trouble he and Rocky could cause?

         It was time to shut them up.
Both of them.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sam sat in the Athens Diner and waited for Callahan while Fitchie made a phone call. Cal had asked Sam to stop there for coffee, and Sam was five minutes early. He felt as different from his boss as he felt from Bin Chea, but didn’t think he’d given Wilkins cause for hating him. Of course, there had been the business about arresting the lieutenant’s brother last Christmas, but Pooey Wilkins never did time. If that was the problem, Wilkins should say so and get it over with.

         Sam opened his wallet and counted five wrinkled ones that looked like the value had been squeezed out. There wasn’t a lot of room in Sam and Julie’s budget. Money poured into groceries, rent, and a balky Ford, while it trickled into a mortgage fund, dance lessons for Trish, and treats like a once-a-month pizza and movie. The department vehicle he was supposed to use had been in the shop for days. If it ever got out, he could stop using his own car.

         The Athens was an old railroad car, its interior papered with images of Aegean islands that had brilliant blue coves filled with small boats. In each corner of the room was a wallpapered Greek column, apparently to give the illusion of holding up the diner. A half dozen maroon stools, some torn, lined the counter that separated the customers from the grill. Sam would have loved to loosen up a little, to sit at the counter and spin himself around, to act like the adolescent he’d never been.

         He sighed and twirled the seat with his finger.

         Cal was right on
time
. His burns looked mostly healed. Nearly a year had passed since Sam had pulled Cal out of a burning wreck. They took a booth at the end of the diner, where Cal could look out the window and see whoever came in the door.

         “You’re looking good, Cal,” Sam said. “Glad you’re back.”

         Cal looked sheepish. “I never thanked you for what you did. You’re one brave son of a bitch.”

         “You thanked me four or five times.”

         Sam didn’t like thinking about the incident, because fire ignited his worst memories like a spark in dry grass.

The soldier was a boy even younger than Sambath. He inhaled deeply on the stub of his cigarette, and tossed it into the embers underneath the prisoner. “I am going now, Comrade,” he told Sambath. “If your father disappears while I am gone, there will be nothing I can do about it.”

         Sambath frantically scattered the coals even before the guard had left. His friends Boreth and Vacheran appeared from the forest, where the full moon reflected light across the fringes. Father was unconscious as they stepped barefoot into the embers and carried him away.